It's remarkable how even this early on, nearly every facet Maddin's unique sensibility is already established. However, it still feels very much like a debut effort, if only in the sense that everything on display here would be further perfected in his later work, namely the absurdist humor (the humor half of the equation mostly came later), and narrative coherence (always a relative trait in Maddin's expressionistic universe, but nonetheless something that he would improve with time.)

Maddin is sort of hit/miss for me. He started out with the short "The Dead Father" which I didn't like much, and then made this, his first feature, which clicked with me. He would flirt with a silent-era visual style in many of his films, but what Tales reminds me the most of is Eraserhead. What Lynch did to Philly, Maddin does to Gimli, creating a fantastic, dark, surreal version of it. Not exactly a "Gimli of old" but something out of a German Expressionist nightmare, bizarre and disturbed.